Sheryl Sandberg Will Become COO of Facebook — Facebook will announce that it will hire top Google executive Sheryl Sandberg as COO this afternoon, in a major hire that is sure to shake up the company and also deliver a blow to rival Google. — At Google (GOOG), Sandberg is the vice president …

The trouble with Steve Jobs — Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk. — (Fortune Magazine) — In October 2003 …

Highlights from Apple's Shareholder Meeting — Details are starting to emerge from Apple's meeting with shareholders, taking place in Cupertino today. Among the tasty bits: — The iPhone will launch in China Asia this year. (We knew that. When? And in what countries?!?)

Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results — Tamar tipped me off to people seeing secondary search boxes in the Google search results. I see them myself now. For example a search on amazon returns this search box directly under the snippet but above the URL, here is a picture:

Backing BuddyPress — Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.

Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million — Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range.

1,000 True Fans — The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches. — But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators.

IAC's Ask.com to Cut 8% of Staff — Ask.com announced an internal restructuring that eliminates 40 jobs as well as plans to turn back the search engine's focus to better answering search queries posed as questions. — The job cuts, which amount to roughly 8% of the company's existing work force …

Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69 — Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games. — Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974 …

When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech? — As we reported yesterday, Nine Inch Nails has followed the Radiohead example and is giving the music away for free. Not all of it, but nine of the thirty six tracks from Trent Reznor's instrumental LP Ghosts I-IV are available for free, with a PDF thrown in.

Firebrand Burns Out — The fire has been banked in an experiment to transform advertising into entertainment. — Firebrand, a television and online service that since October has been presenting commercials as content, is being shut down as its major investors decided to stop providing more money.

The New Workplace Rules: No Video-Watching — Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day.